I am nothing, and everything

Ego has me convinced that 'I' am a discrete, tangible being, separate from the world around me. But this is illusion. I am the sum total of sensations, feelings and thoughts which have occurred since I was born. I will cease to exist when I die. There is no 'I' separate from these streams of experience. In other words, I am what I have perceived, felt and thought, and those streams of consciousness are rooted in my physical being - they are in fact three aspects of the Tetrahedron: the Physical, Emotional and Intellectual.

What then of will, the very essence of ego?

Will has to do with the fourth node of the Tetrahedron, the Spiritual. In short, will is the movement of the eternal and infinite - or the undefinable - spiritual force within me. Will responds to and interacts with the sensations, feelings and especially the thoughts that are generated in the physical me and in-so-doing shapes the person I become and the types of experiences it will encounter. In other words, will is to some degree self defining.

So how can I even use the word 'I' in this context. This is the dichotomy or contradiction that is ego. Spirit cannot manifest except through what is called 'incarnation' in some traditions. Incarnation occurs in the form of discrete, physical entities. So spirit must take on finite forms in order to exist, but in doing so it never loses its connection to eternal and infinite reality (again, the undefinable from the perspective of 'I'). In other words, spirit does not exist outside its incarnate forms, but the incarnate forms do not limit spirit except in an illusory way.

Does this view lessen my appreciation of self? Not at all. Individuated spirit is God expressing him/er self and experiencing his/er world. God does not exist without the illusion of individuated spirit, which makes each and every one of us a miraculous spark in his/er eternal state of becoming.

The Present

flickr photo, Light Chaos by KevinDooley

I know it's been said a million times already, and that a million people after me will say it, too. But all my past experience is concentrated into this one precise moment called the present; and all my future actions begin at this exact moment, too. Pleasure, pain; love, hate; right, wrong; bliss or damnation - everything that possibly can be exists right now, compressed into a present so infinitesimally brief that you could say it does not really exist at all. Therein lies wonder, love and freedom, for in the transitory nature of the present lies our ability and our inalienable right to choose.

Cause and Purpose in the World

I imagine myself standing alone before a room full of people, asking: Anyone who believes they have absolutely no purpose in life, raise your hand. How many would seriously do so? My guess is very few.

Intuitively most of us sense a purpose to our lives and would feel lost without that underlying influence. Most of us believe we are the result of some kind of purposeful unfolding rather than the latest state produced by an incomprehensible chain of soulless reactions or causes.

That sense of purpose lies at the heart of the first statement in my personal creed: I believe I am a manifestation of divine spirit.

Although I can only affirm that for myself, I also believe everyone else manifests the divine.

It is important for me to qualify that statement right away. I am not a foot soldier in the army of the Old Testament God. Rather, I am an expression of Intelligent Desire, the influence of divine spirit unfolding in the universe. God does not command; god wishes to know and express himself through the cycles of becoming, and I am a tiny instance of that eternal, wondrous process.

I believe!

The consequence of Evolution

I have always believed in the persuasive power of friendship and reason, and rejected the application of coercive force as a means of getting people to do my bidding. My aversion to the use of force has blinded me to just how pervasive it is as the mechanism in human affairs. Threats and intimidation in one form or another underlay the vast majority of human interactions.

Often the brute nature of our dealings are masked by a show of cordiality, but if that sham is tested it evaporates and the true nature of our relationships comes to the fore. The kindly boss, who treats his staff to an occasional tray of Tim Horton's coffee - and genuinely believes in his own congeniality - will just as quickly fire the staffer who contradicts him in a serious way or costs too much during a period of economic decline. The enlightened parent, who has smiled upon his sons and daughters in their younger years, becomes harsh and dictatorial if his children do not live up to his moral and social standards later in life.

We resort to an arsenal of punishments to get recalcitrants to do things the way we want them done. Emotional, physical and intellectual weapons are brought to bear on the target of our displeasure, and the anti is upped the longer our enemy - for that is what opponents become - refuses to do what we want the way we want it done. Unless the recalcitrant has no power or influence of his own, in which case he or she is simply ostracized - cut out of the social fabric.

I hate this brutal dynamic and have always sought interstices in the social structure that would give me genuine freedom. I resent it when people want me to participate in the hierarchy of tyranny that constitutes so much of human behaviour: the schemata of use and abuse, the quashing of daydreams. I would rather risk failure than succumb to what amounts to a betrayal of my very nature.

Teach me how I have sinned

~
Show me the errors of my ways.
Trace my footprints in the sand
back to that place where first
I tended in the wrong direction,
the waves crashing at my back,
your wind propelling me on a course
I mistook for fate.

Help me understand my sin.
Train your mighty microscope
upon the elements of my soul
and find therein
the seeds of my distemper.
Call it dirt, or grit, or dust.
Call it what you must.
Point to it at the same time...
with that crooked finger
that points at every thing in every way.

Please, I beg you,
show me the nature of my sin
and I will confer blessings
upon you and all your kind.


flickr photo by ezioman
~

What is Spirit?

~
Spirit is:

• Indivisible
• Inherent
• Eminent
• Uncreated
• Dimensionless
• Timeless
• Glorious

~

At what point is Free Will expressed?

Free will is concomitant with but not identical to having a choice. Humans have both free will and the freedom to choose; cats have only the freedom to choose. If we look farther down the evolutionary time line, we encounter the point where the freedom to choose begins to separate itself from pure instinct. A cat has the freedom to choose; an ant responds to stimuli immediately without any question as to the pros or cons of an action. Farther still, and we are at the point where sentience and instinct separate themselves from plant life and other non-sentient forms of being. Before that spirit must have been inherent in a form I cannot conceive of.

I have drawn out this sequence of events because it suggests Free Will is the outcome of evolution, and has only manifested in this corner of the universe in very recent times, as measured on the evolutionary scale. Philosophically that opens a portal into a huge area of discussion, which must be left for another time. But there is one crucial point that I want to consider now: Is Free Will immanent from the earliest inception of life? In other words, is life a progression toward Free Will?

Extreme caution is needed here. I am not implying that life-manifestations which express Free Will are 'above' those that don't in some sort of evolutionary chain. Rather, I want to explore the notion that the role of humans is to embody and express Free Will as part of the unfolding wonder of spirit.

The unorthodox conclusion I have arrived at is that Free Will does not exist outside of manifest spirit. As I've said elsewhere, I don't believe spirit can exist without manifesting itself in some physical form. Further, Intelligent Desire - which is the process of spirit unfolding - progresses toward Free Will, just as it progressed toward life, sentience and choice. But Free Will cannot be said to exist before it is manifest. In short, the entity many religions refer to as God has evolved, manifesting himerself in the totality of spiritual forms that presently exist, and there has been a tendency from the outset for evolution to produce beings that express Free Will.

As I consider this admittedly convoluted analysis another notion is beginning to take hold. I believe what we call God, or the World Spirit, or the Unmoved Mover is a simple force of immense power and consequence. I call that force Love and the consequence of love is Intelligent Desire.

What, then, of Hatred? Where does the tendency to nihilism come from? An important precurser to thought on this conundrum is the understanding that Free Will is meaningless unless it encompasses the ability to succeed of fail - the ability to be anything conceivable. The ability to create or destroy.

Tetrahedron

flickr image by fdecomite

The Tetrahedron is a schematic for understanding how individuated spirit experiences the world. Nodes of the Tetrahedron are:

• Physical (Pleasure, Pain)
• Emotional (Love, Hate)
• Intellectual (Right, Wrong)
• Spiritual (Infinite, Finite)

It is important to bear in mind that the Tetrahedron does not exist. It is merely a framework for describing the channels of consciousness. I believe this model encompasses everything individuated spirit has believed or is capable of believing.

Knowledge transcends this limited, temporal framework.

The limits of human belief have been transcended by great mystics and prophets throughout history. However, they are never able to describe their experiences to the less enlightened, and have always resorted to fables and parables as guideposts for the rest of us. Their transcendent knowledge is often appropriated by The Old Men in Robes, who use religious systems as a means of consolidating political power.

The connection between the individual and the divine is through the Spiritual Node; but the Spiritual Node cannot exist without the other three.